Extra Special: If the slashing strings of “Psycho” didn’t immediately identify Herrmann (with the shower scene music thankfully not repeated here), then the orchestral version of pianist’s Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March For A Marionette” comes in second as the signature theme for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” a darkly droll piece that’s wittily used to wrap the album up with.

If this golden “Playbook” had a dangerous sense of unpredictability that gave its lunatic love story a real edge, then part of that credit goes to filmmaker David O. Russell’s surprisingly whimsical choice in music. And one particularly inspired choice was giving Danny Elfman, a composer best known for ghoulish black comedy, the chance to go for positively sunny quirk. Think John Lennon in Elfman’s peace and love guitar stylings, beatific chorus and quirky percussion

Writing music often is a solitary pursuit, so it was no wonder that when six renowned composers -- Marco Beltrami, 46 (The Sessions), Mychael Danna, 54 (Life of Pi), Alexandre Desplat, 51 (Argo, Moonrise Kingdom, Rise of the Guardians,Zero Dark Thirty), Patrick Doyle, 59 (Brave), Danny Elfman, 59 (Frankenweenie, Hitchcock, Promised Land,Silver Linings Playbook), and Fernando Velazquez, 36 (The Impossible) -- gathered in one room, they relished the chance to discuss the complexities of their trade as part of THR's roundtable series. The setting for this gathering of scoring heavy hitters and potential Academy Award nominees: a soundstage sans musicians but with the familiar trappings of a workspace they know all too intimately. Indeed, the high-pressure undertaking of putting music to picture can be a painful process, but the rewards, like a perfectly formed, unforgettable melody, are worth every sacrifice -- and there are many.

It is also possible to find some sort of humour/sarcasm to this dead-serious atmosphere with “Funeral March For a Marionette” and the jazzy/sexy “Selling Psycho”. The overall lesson for Elfman is that grey, black and beige are also nice and they match with everything else. So let’s try them!

I love and enjoy his work and Frankenweenie is lacking something here that his scores for MIB3, Hitchcock and Silver Lining's Playbook had. I don't know, maybe it's a score that will grow on me as the years go, but for now it is one that is a polished and professional breezy score is very effective for what it is and his fans will not be disappointed by it or if they are, they can always put on Edward Scissorhands. Marginal recommendation.

Danny Elfman is finishing his busiest year ever, with no fewer than six films in the marketplace, including two for longtime collaborator Tim Burton ("Dark Shadows," "Frankenweenie") and "Men in Black 3" for Barry Sonnenfeld.

As for "Promised Land," Elfman's initial thought was "Midwest, a simple story, country folks, I'll use fiddles and guitars." But Van Sant's attitude about music, Elfman says, is always, "let's try something completely different." He saw all the marimbas in Elfman's studio and so marimba wound up as a key musical component.

"Gus is fearless," Elfman says. "He just likes to try things, and that makes it fun for me. What is or isn't right can be a subjective thing. With 'Promised Land,' it was intimate and small -- a chamber orchestra."

Buy it... if you seek a throwback to Danny Elfman's early orchestral works of fiendish humor, his personality implanted well upon the topic despite limited opportunities to develop his effective themes for the famed director and his wife.

Avoid it... if you wish to hear Elfman channel Bernard Herrmann for the entirety of Hitchcock, for while he certainly rolls out such nods several times, this remains a score saturated with Elfman's own style.

Overall, Hitchcock is a fun score for the Elfman enthusiast and contains enough substance to justify its rather short album presentation. The themes do seem slightly underutilized, especially in how Elfman alternates between the darker and upbeat variations on the identity for the titular character. Then again, many of the film's best conversational moments exist without any music spotted in them, so the composer may have been restricted a bit in his opportunities for deeper development. Elfman collectors will be especially thrilled by how much of the composer's own musical personality thrives in this context, further connecting him with the Hitchcock and Herrmann legacy.

Buy it... on the score-only album if you wish to hear the best material Danny Elfman wrote for this picture, the song compilation product inexplicably including the least redemptive portions of the score.

Avoid it... unless you are an Elfman completist and can justify an unsubstantial, 20-minute album with your established soft spot for his heartfelt, contemporary romance style for small, light pop ensembles.

Sabtu, Desember 08, 2012

"With another director," Elfman said, "I may have tossed up my hands and just said, 'I can't handle this.' I like him personally, though, so I was able to kick back and relax and just let him go where he goes. If there ends up being music, there's music, if there ends up being no music, then that was my job. My job was to show him that he doesn't want any music."

In the end, there was music. "Silver Linings Playbook" was an anomaly among Elfman's scores. Largely centered on a jangly guitar, a cresting piano and fragile vocal harmonies, it was pop-focused and full of odd little melodies.

And though the composer does not like comedies ("It is a genre that is clearly off my list. I do not do them"), "Silver Linings" hooked him, and that's because it reminded Elfman of films that no longer exist. "I felt like this was Frank Capra and Billy Wilder. This film connected with a period when I actually did like romantic comedies."

Elfman had already revisited the work of famed composer and Alfred Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann, so he instead used a small orchestra and actually played it not too unlike that of an old-fashioned romantic comedy. Violins carry the score, but they're in a constant give-and-take with French horns and a piano.

"The music is in many elements a comedy, and Sacha [Gervasi] wanted to make it clear that it's OK to have fun with sections of this movie," Elfman said. "The heartfelt part needed to be very heartfelt. I tried to create an old-fashioned romantic theme, not from any particular era but in the mold of how a classic romantic theme might be."

After close to 500 well received shows at the world renowned Dolby Theatre, the last performance of IRIS by Cirque du Soleil will be January 19, 2013. Despite phenomenal reviews and enthusiastic audience response, demand has not met projections. We have been honored to work with both the City of Los Angeles and the CIM Group to launch IRIS at this iconic location. It has been a joy to stage IRIS in the beautiful state-of-the-art Dolby Theatre and we appreciate the wonderful relationships we have built in Los Angeles. For the time being, we will redeploy as many as our artists and employees to other Cirque du Soleil projects.

Performances of IRIS from 20 January through 26 January have been canceled. Any customer who has purchased tickets for these performances, please return to your point of sale for a refund or exchange into another performance.

Inspirational comparisons can be drawn to 1950s schlock-horror films and some of the more gothic atmospheres from the 1960s era of Hammer. It’s not wholly unexpected, as we all know what Elfman is capable of, and we are all well familiar with his track record and work ethic with Tim Burton. So, while the score may not be a total surprise, but it is definitely a welcome treat this time of the year. And beyond that, it is probably one of the more appropriate scores to use to ease a small child into the Danny Elfman aesthetic.

Sony Classical's album is a brief, but enjoyable, powerful experience that Elfman's fans will really enjoy on its own merits. I was actually quite surprised at how much I did like this one along with Silver Linings Playbook and it really seems to me that Elfman is really getting back to that late period in the 1990's where he really excelled and his work was getting broader and broader which is why he's become a really diverse composer able to score films such as Hitchcock and the many others in the past years he has since the late 90's in his mature mode. The most enjoyable aspect is how Elfman shifts his darker romantic material to a lighter tone and keep everything on an even keel musically and Elfman in this mold is something very special that's been somewhat missing the last few years. Hitchcock is a score that will remind alot of people of that great period and hopefully the start of a another great one for the great composer. Definitely recommended.

Elfman does not provide pastiches of the PSYCHO score here but rather reflects its sensibility in his score’s orchestration and harmonic structure (the End Titles are perhaps the most distinctly Hitchcockian/Herrmannesque in their string and horn intonations). It’s very much a Danny Elfman score, and a superior one at that, evoking the personality of Hitch as only Elfman can, while also conveying a very heartfelt and honest emotion for his intense regard for Alma.

Rabu, Desember 05, 2012

After composing five film scores straight, without a weekend off, it’s fair to that Danny Elfman has had a very long year. Still, there was no limit to what he would do to work on a film about his idol, Alfred Hitchcock. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I have to do this,” Elfman recalls about committing to Fox Searchlight’s Hitchcock, which was scheduled for delivery right before his opus on Disney’s Oz: The Great And Powerful. “I wouldn’t have a film-music career if it wasn’t for Bernard Herrmann, who has inspired me since the age of 12.”“He literally bought sections of the orchestra out of his own pocket,” says a gobsmacked Gervasi. “We were recording with the top musicians in London, and we couldn’t afford to keep them through lunch. Danny asked the orchestrator, ‘How much do the violas cost? 3,000£? I’ll take them. How much for the French horns?’ And Danny held the musicians through lunch.”Also keeping Elfman at the top of his game is the company he keeps with offbeat directors who challenge him. At first, when Elfman heard Silver Linings Playbook was a romantic comedy, he resisted. “That is the genre that I feel no affinity toward at all, and it’s the only one I stay away from. I did a few early on in my career, and they were incredibly difficult.”“I was playing around with instruments and put my vocals onto one piece as a goof, and David was like, ‘Do more of that! Do more of that!’, like he was producing me. Before we knew it, that’s what we were doing,” Elfman says with a laugh. “It was really crazy and off the track of what I’m usually doing, which is writing very intense, big scores.”As one of the few scoresmiths who can churn out a panoramic orchestral creation, Elfman will likely get his due from the Academy one day. Already his eighth reteaming with Sam Raimi, Oz: The Great And Powerful, sounds like the type of epic, á la Lawrence of Arabia, that voters crave.“The movie has this big, blustery old-fashioned feel, and I wanted to give it a big, effective, narrative score,” Elfman says. “It’s huge—105 minutes of music.”

The album is about 40 minutes long, which is quite short these days as film music fans have become accustomed to 1 hour plus OST releases and even longer archival ones. The average track length is roughly a minute and a half, so while it may initially feel disjointed, the album works tremendously well as a whole in the end. It breathes and does not feel too quick nor does it overstay its welcome.

In a year of Elfman duds, Hitchcock is a lovely gust of fresh air from the composer. Dark Shadows, Men In Black 3, and Frankenweenie all disappointed, yet this one ultimately delivers and displays Elfman's contemporary drama writing wonderfully. While the "Theme From Hitchcock" is less melodic and developed than other great Elfman themes, the score as a whole will keep listeners delighted without tethering you to your music player for too long.

Highlights include the opening Logos which are lead by the harps while the reeds in the background enhance the creepy mood with harmony in the way of pizzicato strings. This is merely a prelude for the Theme from Hitchcock, a Largo tempo, which features yearning strings and a clarinet offering the harmony. It is a theme that will be repeated throughout the score, a motif for Hitchcock.

I found that with repeated listens much of the subtle nuances that Elfman used will come to the surface. It overall has a Herrmann sound but it doesn’t. It has an Elfman flavor but it isn’t. The music style incorporated is an Elfman original which is also a tribute to one of the finer film composers of all time Bernard Herrmann. Recommended

The score only clocks in just over 20 minutes, so while it is quite brief, Elfman does not fail to prick your ears up. Piano, guitar, and elated choir invoke a wonderful feel-good mood that is unique to Elfman's style without ever really sounding like anything he has done before. The music is mono thematic; whichever track you choose to play will run you into some variation of it filtered through the instrumentation mentioned above. Due to this, the score can tend to run out of steam surprisingly quick despite its short length. The final cue, "Good Track," features, you guessed it, goofy lyrics about the actors in the film superimposed over the theme.

Elfman's quirky and lighthearted drama score does not get a good work out in terms of orchestration, but if you are in the mood for something short and sweet, look no further. Recommended for diehard Danny Elfman fans or for those who enjoyed the film, the sparsity of the music here may fail to draw in casual listeners.

Being a contemporary comedy-drama, the film didn’t require an elaborate score for a full orchestra, so instead Elfman dipped back into his bag of tricks and emerged with a light, tuneful orchestral-rock score that plays like a combination of his score for Midnight Run back in the 1980s, Taking Woodstock from 2009, and the songs he wrote for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 2005, sans lyrics. The score is performed mainly by piano, guitars and percussion, with a few light synth overdubs here and there, and the occasional inclusion of a wordless male voice choir singing in a light pop style and a 1960s vibe

...it’s slight, short, inconsequential, but an enjoyable and undemanding diversion for anyone who enjoys Elfman’s melodious and carefree modern rock sound. In the film the score plays definite second fiddle to the numerous rock songs by artists like Stevie Wonder, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, but the memorable central piano melody is catchy enough to become a compilation favorite, and you may hear it played plenty of times at the Academy Awards ceremony in 2013. The score is a digital download only, and although it won’t appeal to score fans who only appreciate Elfman when he’s firmly entrenched in Batman mode, its well worth checking out for Elfman completists.